It seems to me that a lot of social business effort is being spent barking up the wrong tree. Many of our organizations have a century of well entrenched Taylorism behind them.

Their employees are paid and measured based upon individual work. As a result of this, and reinforced by their job descriptions, few have any incentive to collaborate or share knowledge.

Throw in that decisions are typically made based on hierarchy rather than knowledge, that information is often far from transparent and readily available throughout the organization and that feedback on both collective and individual performance is often incredibly sporadic.

Is it any surprise that enterprise social networks aren't taking off? Buying a tool won't make people collaborate when so many of the other things in their work environment are telling them not to.

These tools aren't difficult to pick up, and if you fix the environment so that it encourages collaborative behaviours then I'm fairly sure you'll get much better adoption of them.

@Tom, I agree with you on that point. To improve adoption, businesses need to focus on launching something simple and intuitive at the outset. If Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ were too complicated at the outset, people wouldn't have used it.

If training is required, the system is already too complicated. Facebook, Google+, and Twitter don't require training (though not everything is obvious at the outset). Collaboration platforms should need no explanation.

It's futile to try to change the collaboration habits of an entire organization in one fell swoop. It's too many people to get running in the same direction. It's difficult to do that in most departments let alone the entire company. Social tools only gain momentum in pockets, as the article mentions. When a small group uses social to improve communication and productivity, other groups will hear about it and want to try it, and then it snowballs. Group adoption matters as long as the groups are small.

At the individual level, never understimate the "what's in it for me?" factor. All the training and executive reminders and threats won't increase uptake long term unless individuals see and experience the value in using said collaboration platform. They must be a natural part of the workflow, not a forced march.

This is something my company has spent a considerable amount of time on, both developing, and testing methods for increasing the abysmal adoption success rates of collaboration software (around 10%). We're releasing our adoption toolkit soon (it's in final sanity checks at moment), but you're welcome to an early preview here: http://www.sideraworks.com/preview-collaboration-technology-adoption-toolkit/

In regards to individual, group, and org segmentation I don't think you can separate the three in a successful adoption initiative. There are many interdependent sociological factors between those three segments.

Cheers,

Matt RidingsCo-Founder and CEO, SideraWorksCreating Social Business Success Stories

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